Browsersphere

While doing some web design brainstorming earlier today, I wondered if any progress had been made on adding support for CSS Gradients beyond WebKit, for which support was first introduced a little over a year ago.  Via MozillaZine, I realized I’m not the only one wondering this, and ended up stumbling upon the Bugzilla bug tracking the progress of CSS Gradients support in Firefox.  Reading through some of the commentary there, it gave me a newfound appreciation for just how fluid the implementation of these kinds of features really is.  For example, it’s somewhat obvious that the original support as announced at Surfin’ Safari was based on some of the canvas documentation related to HTML 5.

Paraphrasing the HTML5 spec and adjusting the language slightly to not be canvas-specific:

“The color of the gradient at each stop is the color specified for that stop. Between each such stop, the colors and the alpha component must be linearly interpolated over the RGBA space without premultiplying the alpha value to find the color to use at that offset. Before the first stop, the color must be the color of the first stop. After the last stop, the color must be the color of the last stop. When there are no stops, the gradient is transparent black…”

Furthermore, it’s obvious that not everyone completely agreed with the initial implementation, and it’s clear that Firefox developers collaborated with WebKit developers to hone in on a more logical implementation.

All of that being said, the reality is that CSS Gradients are not supported widely enough at the moment to be considered tools in the common web developer’s tool belt.  As aforementioned, Firefox support is still in progress (as of yesterday, in fact) and support in Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 10 appears to be non-existent, based on visits to this demo in those browsers.  The demo only seems to work as expected in Safari and Chrome (the latest “Dev” version, at least), which makes sense, since those are the major players that sport WebKit under the hood.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the progress of CSS Gradients support and several other, similar implementations over the coming year.

Tags: Bugzilla, Canvas, Chrome, CSS, CSS Gradients, Development, Features, Firefox, Google Chrome, HTML 5, IE8, Internet Explorer, Opera 10, Opera 10 Alpha, Parity, Safari, Safari 4 Beta, Web Development, Web Standards, WebKit

I caught this back in September and it took me until now to post it. Nice.

Anyway, without further ado, Dwight Silverman offers up his take on IE7Pro and how it brings parity with Firefox’s “Restore Session” feature to IE7. He also lists several other advantages to using IE7Pro, including built-in spell checking, an ad blocker, support for mouse gestures and a feature that sounds similar to Greasemonkey support in Firefox.

Tags: Add-ons, Extensions, Features, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Parity, Reviews

According to YugaTech, Internet Explorer will remaing king of the browsers.  Several of the reasons given hold water, such as the fact that IE comes bundled with all computers that ship with a Windows operating system installed.  However, there are a couple that are flat-out wrong, like:

You want online banking? More or less, you’ll need to fire up IE. You want to pay utility bills with your credit card online? IE again.

I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t remember the last time I had to use Internet Explorer for anything that required security, a credit card or paying a bill.

Maybe things are different in the Philippines.

Tags: Elsewhere, Internet Explorer, Market Share, Parity, Security

The folks over at the Maxthon Blog have explained why the answer to the question of whether or not Greasemonkey scripts work in Maxthon is both “yes” and “no.”  However, after you read the post, you realize the real answer is “no.”  They just support similar functionality.

Tags: Extensions, Features, Maxthon, Parity

From Ars Technica:

The much-anticipated page zoom feature has finally landed in Firefox 3 nightly builds. Firefox 3 will now be able to zoom the entire page, including images as well as text, just like Opera and IE 7.

The page zoom feature request was originally filed in Bugzilla in 1999, but implementation was delayed because it wasn’t considered practical in Gecko 1.8, the current version of Firefox’s HTML rendering engine. Scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 3, the new version of the rendering engine—Gecko 1.9—leverages the open source Cairo vector graphics rendering framework and includes a number of extremely significant improvements to layout and rendering. The page zoom feature was implemented as part of the Gecko overhaul and will now be included in Firefox 3.

Apparently the feature hasn’t been exposed via the browser chrome, yet, but Ars Technica gives an example of how to test it out in the latest build(s).

Tags: Development, Features, Firefox, Parity, Unreleased